A Study of the English Translations of Clause-initial Patient Topics in Chinese:
from the Perspective of Placement of Tonic

Abstract

The clause-initial patient topic sentence is the sentence with clause-initial patient topic at the head which is the object of the predicate. The topic points at the vacancy after the predicate. The most common forms for the clause-initial patient topic sentence are TSV form and TV form. There are two trends for translations of the clause-initial patient topic sentence. The first one is to translate the original sentences into unmarked SVO sentences by moving topics after verbs in original sentences. The second one is to translate sentences correspondingly to original sentences. From the perspective of prosody, the stressed words and the new information in clause-initial patient topic sentences and SVO sentences are found through observing the pitch contour of both 21 clause-initial patient topic sentences from the chapter 4 of Fortress Besieged and 31 SVO sentences from TOFEL official guide and the placement of tonic in both 52 samples. By combining the original sentences and the translation translated by Jeanne Kelly and Nathan K.Mao and their prosodic features, the appropriateness of translation of clause-initial patient topic sentences is judged, which proves that it is more proper to translate clause-initial patient topic sentences into unmarked SVO sentences. Moreover, because of the weakening trend of subjects in clause-initial patient topic sentences and the placement of tonic being right after topic in TV forms and variants, reasons for the subject ellipse in TV forms are found out: the Principle of Economy and the existence of subject in former or later clauses.

Key words: Translation of clause-initial patient topic sentence, SVO sentence, pitch contour, placement of tonic, subject ellipse, the Principle of Economy